Our 2018 Sprint & DFA Accelerator Class is here!

We’ve hit a milestone here at the Sprint Accelerator! We are celebrating our fifth year AND we are welcoming our fifth class of great startup companies!!

Together with Sprint and Dairy Farmers of America (DFA) we are excited to introduce to you the nine companies participating in our 2018 program! Once again our program will focus on creating working partnerships between our corporate sponsors and our selected companies.

The Sprint IoT team is welcoming three companies into the program, including one from right here in Kansas City.

We are proud to support this year’s class of cutting-edge startups. Sprint has an ambitious vision for IoT and we look forward to working alongside these companies to continue the evolution of IoT technologies and solutions – Ivo Rook, senior vice president of IoT for Sprint.

DFA has expanded their side of the program. We have accepted three AgTech companies to help develop new products and services for DFA’s member farms. In addition, we also have three dairy-food product companies joining us. These food product companies will greatly benefit from DFA’s resources around production, manufacturing and brand marketing.

We’ve found tremendous value in this program and leveraging innovation that’s happening with startup companies in the AgTech space. It’s exciting to add dairy food startups into the mix. We’re looking forward to working with these companies to help grow their businesses and ultimately drive consumer demand for dairy. – Kevin Strathman, senior vice president of finance at Dairy Farmers of America.

Stay tuned for more details about how you can meet the companies in April, and follow our progress on Twitter @sprintaccel!

Without further ado, we present the Sprint & DFA Accelerator 2018 Companies…

IoT Participants

Keybot from St. Louis. Keybot helps automate rental access with proprietary keypad lock and app through self-showings and renter and maintenance access.

Ripe Technologies from San Francisco, Calif. Ripe is transforming the food supply chain using blockchain technology to enable data transparency, so we know where our food is from and what has happened to it.

SomaDetect from Fredericton, Canada. SomaDetect is a precision-dairy company that is creating an in-line system for measuring every compound of interest in raw milk, including fat, protein, somatic cells, progesterone and trace antibiotics.

Dairy Food Product Participants

Cheddies from San Antonio, Texas. Cheddies aims to provide all consumers with a cheese cracker that has added nutritional benefits. These benefits include 10g of protein, 12g of carbohydrates, no artificial flavors or colors and 0g of sugar.

MoPro Nutrition from Birmingham, Mich. MoPro is the first Greek yogurt infused with CFM Whey Protein Isolate that contains 24 grams of protein per serving and is low in sugar.